Page 82 - HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

MARKETING MALPRACTICE

around full-service facilities that were good to hire for large meet-
ings. When it decided to extend its brand to other types of hotels, it
adopted a two-word brand architecture that appended to the Mar-
riott endorsement a purpose brand for each of the different jobs its
new hotel chains were intended to do. Hence, individual business
travelers who need to hire a clean, quiet place to get work done in
the evening can hire Courtyard by Marriott—the hotel designed by
business travelers for business travelers. Longer-term travelers can
hire Residence Inn by Marriott, and so on. Even though these hotels
were not constructed and decorated to the same premium standard
as full-service Marriott hotels, the new chains actually reinforce the
endorser qualities of the Marriott brand because they do the jobs
well that they are hired to do.
Milwaukee Electric Tool has built purpose brands with two—and
only two—of the products in its line of power tools. The Milwaukee
Sawzall is a reciprocating saw that tradesmen hire when they need
to cut through a wall quickly and aren’t sure what’s under the sur-
face. Plumbers hire Milwaukee’s Hole Hawg, a right-angle drill,
when they need to drill a hole in a tight space. Competitors like Black
& Decker, Bosch, and Makita offer reciprocating saws and right-
angle drills with comparable performance and price, but none of
them has a purpose brand that pops into a tradesman’s mind when
he has one of these jobs to do. Milwaukee has owned more than 80%
of these two job markets for decades.
Interestingly, Milwaukee offers under its endorser brand a full
range of power tools, including circular saws, pistol-grip drills,
sanders, and jigsaws. While the durability and relative price of these
products are comparable to those of the Sawzall and Hole Hawg,
Milwaukee has not built purpose brands for any of these other prod-
ucts. The market share of each is in the low single digits—a testa-
ment to the clarifying value of purpose brands versus the general
connotation of quality that endorser brands confer. Indeed, a clear
purpose brand is usually a more formidable competitive barrier than
superior product performance—because competitors can copy per-
formance much more easily than they can copy purpose brands.

72